– Who are you by nationality? – asked the Colonel.
Nabis stared at him, then realized and smiled a little.
– You think I have an accent. This is a speech defect, comrade Colonel.
– I beg your pardon, – the Colonel muttered distinctly odd words for him and turned pale, which evidently replaced his “flushed”. – Guilty… But you do not understand the aim of the mission… What isn't clear about it? To detain a person with a little child seen from the tower, withdraw from the disaster zone, interview and provide assistance.
– Comrade Colonel, this is the Father, – said Nabis quietly.
– What does it mean – “the Father”? Does it mean he is a known person?
– He is the only one who survived in the Lightning. I mean they are only two. He and his daughter.
They were sitting side by side on the ebonite armchairs with folding seats, installed on the floor of the aboard Kharon's “shishiga”251. (Kharon stole the chairs in the cinema hall of the Dog's village club, four in a row on the iron rack.) Nabis was sitting on the edge. From the Earth they left through the Second, “Volgogradsky”, checkpoint and for the “greeting” of the pioneers Kharon immediately turned to the Stand, a concrete pad where two cars quietly rusted in the endless sun, dryness and heat. Door to door, white “Volga” of the missing Chief of the Polygon and “Zaporozgets” of some, probably also missing, Ensign. Neither Dog's poachers, nor bottle-women, nor even cops from the guard towers allowed themselves to touch these cars.
In the areas of housing (“The Dog's curve”) the weather inside the “neutral” had a specific behavior. A hot June day was reigning in this part of it in the middle of a cold November of the Earth. The “time of midges”, which was terrible in the Lower Volga region. But of course there were no midges in the “neutral”, as there was no other local living creatures, including cockroaches. They say, there were not even bacteria here. The dead ground, the zero circle. It was very quiet here, there was no sound from the human side, although running red and green excavators, literally a hundred meters away, were visible beyond the Volgograd-Astrakhan highway, ragged by the Zone. Well, on the alien side there was no one to make noise.
(But stupid TV tower was not seen from the “neutral”. What to show and what not to show the “neutral” chooses by itself. “Interesting, when the Colonel notices this”, thought Nabis, “will he rush back to figure it out? They say, one million rubles was stolen during the building of this tower. It was not created by a fool, of course. There was enough to carve up.”)